Ted Ts'o writes:

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>N1) The Minix demo disk which you can get from plains.novak.edu only
>works for 5.25" disks --- this isn't documented anywhere, but I spent a

It should work on 720K disks. The Minix /dev/fd0 does not support 1.44M,
/dev/PS0 is needed for that, and the demo disk has fd0 hard-coded.

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>N2)  The numbering convestion for partition in Minix and Linux are
>different!!!  The way I dealt with it is to use a disk editor to write a

The Minix hard disk drivers sort the partition table :-(. This problem
goes back to DOS 3.0 (3.2?) and before, which have a different idea
about the partition order than 3.3 (but I think it is just a straight
reversal, not a sort).

N3)  ...
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>It would be nice if Linux understood the DOS extended partitions, though.

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>[ Note: whoever decided that IBM hard disks only needed 4 partitions
>should be condemned to recabling machine room floors; CP/M on

Kai Uwe Rommel says that extended partitions have worked to solve this
problem since DOS 3.3. I wonder where this is documented.

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>Q1)  On nic.funet.fi, I found sources to shoelace, which seems to be a
>way to boot Minix without needing a floppy boot disk.  Is anyone working
>on something similar for Linux?  The other interesting thing about

Since Linux uses the Minix file system, the shoelace binaries should work
immediately. The sources probably require changing because of different
header files.

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>shoelace is that it came with a file "shoefsck.c" which seems to contain
>the necessary code filesystem checking for Minix.  However, there's no
>copyright notice on that file, and no email address for the author,

This file was copied from the Minix fsck.c so it is presumably copyright.
Most of the rest of shoelace could be used by Linux without copyright
problems.

Bruce